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In the book, Kerouac narrates a long journey of several young people who get together, drive or hitchhike across the continental United States several times, discuss about literature, belief and Zen Buddhism. Along the way they binge on drinking, marijuana, and explore the truth of life. In this most quasi-autobiographical novel, Sal Paradise is the narrator and one of protagonists. The whole story is divided into five parts in chronological order, three of them describing road trips with Moriarty. Their crazy adventure and the theme of chasing truth causes a trend of “traveling” in the global scope, still hold tremendous influence nowadays.
Over the years, On the Road has been given great attention by public and sold well, even the top of bestseller list for many years. However, there came a lot of criticism and controversy about On the Road besides the favorable comments. Most of them aim at the description of the “Beat” life style in the book. Some conservatives were displeased with the detailed description about sex, drug taking, homosexuality and some other situations of characters in the novel. But the negative reaction from critics was not as intense as they had towards other two beat writers’ works, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.
Characters in On the Road all possess distinctive personality. Most of them were created on the base of some key figures in the Beat movement as prototypes, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee) and Allen Ginsberg (Carol Marx), including Kerouac himself, as the narrator Sal Paradise.
On the Road is a classic work to be reckoned as a success in American literature, not just because its attainments, but also for its true and fair presentation of that generation, as well as reflection of “Beat” spirit. The novel shows the life of the Beat Generation unreservedly and vividly. Elements like drugs, alcohol, and sex throughout the whole story and appear frequently between the lines. That is the real situation of the Beats at that time. The book is a mirror of the American society in the middle of the 20th century. It embodies the picture of the “Beat Generation” at the bottom of society, being poor, coarse, emotional, but passionate with the true self. They dare to seek their belief in unsettled circumstance, which has inspire tens of thousands of readers, who not just live in the certain condition, but also from different background, even different eras.
1.2 A brief introduction of the Beat Generation
As similar with the “Lost Generation”, coming of age during World War I in America, a term describes people who are “not vanished but disoriented, wandering, directionless” (Hynes, 1990), the “Beat Generation” is the label of the generation after the “lost” one, who came to prominence in the 1950s, post-World War II period. After the Second World War, a “rebel movement against reality” began to spring up. There was a group of poets and writers, who were poor and cynical at that time, wrote out their confusion about the reality and satirize every fault of the world in their eyes. That is the “Beat Generation”. What maintained this group was mainly their private friendship, though their ideas were not always the same, the members influenced each other deeply. They create works in an unprecedented, ruleless and spontaneous way, sometimes very confusing. It is one of literary genres in the United States as well as the “Lost Generation”. “Beat” writers are often controversial, the reason is that their works usually don't follow the traditional rules; the structure and form are often disorganized, rough and even with vulgar language. Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac are the three best known examples of them whose works possess representative significance of the “Beat Generation”.
The term “beat” was introduced by Jack Kerouac in 1948 to refer to people who took part in a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York. Literally, the word “beat” possesses negative meanings such as "tired" or "beaten down", and that is the reason why the “Beat Generation” suffered misunderstandings in the following period when it was introduced into China and some other countries in the initial stage. While Kerouac promoted it more in a positive sense of "upbeat" and "beatific", as well as the musical conception of being "on the beat".